The Real Lag: Avatars

I became excited by Second Life the first moment I left the welcome area. The creativity, nice people... I immediately want to find a way to bring over other PC-playing friends who spend their lives in games like World of WarCraft. I thought a nice conquest-style sim would be a draw that would lead them into the economy, shopping, socializing, building and all the wonderful features available.

It's now been a month. My shopping spree is over, I've made some good friends, done some building and scripting but feel I've reached my limit. The word is lag, and everyone uses it in such a global since that the Linden's usually have no real way to answer the question. So I'll be sepecific.

Having four avatars in line of sight causes Second Life to drop below 15fps. All the time. Under every circumstance. Whether they're sitting, chatting, walking around. It's just not usable.

I have a very fast PC, am using an ATI X1600 512MB videocard, have 0 packet loss. On a private island I am renting I can get a consistent 55fps and sometimes up to 80fps.

Add just one other person and its an acceptable 40fps. Three people in line of sight, down to 15fps. This is with few prims in the environment (just a fake floor and road system).

I'm primarily an Xbox Live gamer. On what is essentially a five year old PC where the host's bandwisth is shared to all the clients (not superfast dedicated servers like SL is running, right?) I can host Star Wars Battlefront with 24 people and 16 AI units. This is a game with flying and driving vehicles, plantable mines, and sometimes additional AI units. And this is all with simultaneous voice chat.

Look, I understand its apples and oranges. SL has constant changing user data, scripts and more. But in a similar setup where each "client" is not changing avatars/clothing, has already streamed all the textures and prim geometry, what's the real difference? The diffrence is SL should be FASTER, I am not acting as host, AI programming is much more complex even if it is running on one box in compiled form with locations and animations already existing on each client's box so only position information must be transferred... I'll stop.

I sat at today's Town Meeting curious as to what concerns other users had. Lag came up once. But most people wanted more features. They cared about economy. It's almost as if this community lives in a vaccum, unaware of the experience other online environments. It's obvious the Lindens care about lag, but instead of ever seeing how this type of avatar lag can be minimized I hear about new avatar features that are most likely going to elevate not alleviate these issues.

I guess I don't know where to post this. Perhaps there's no desire for conventional gaming activities within Second Life. If that's true I won't say I wasted my time and a couple thousand dollars here, but I will be disappointed because it's obvious that the scenario I first envisioned was perfect: lure conventional gamers with the creativity in building SL offers and then sell them on community. But that is just not possible given the current rendering engine.

I can't even end this post with the obvious question: what can be done about avatar lag? Because it appears like an accepted "reality" of the experience. There was much excitement over increased users at the Town Meeting. At the same time I look at two small parecels in the middle of my largest piece of land that I would like to buy and yet I have looked for the owners for the last month and they have never logged in. I came because I "discoverd" SL in a Computer Gaming World article. I got excited because of the potential, both realized and yet to be. Now my participation is in question because for me that potential, which is not based around building virtual sex organs or dancing for L$, may not be possible.

Chris Rowley
aka
Clubside Granville

http://www.GamerResource.com

Xbox Live: clubside, clubside360, Caligula II, The Polemic, GamerResource

Nothing new really, but yes , avatars make sim crawl , put 25+ in one no matter where youll start to see it go bad, get 40+ and its, ermm well hope youre not planning on moving for awhile,some attachments can outright kill a pc.

Whats being done, eh occuling, more aggressive lods, if you think its bad now... you should been here awhile ago : p

Sticking around to see where its going for now

I guess my problem after reading other threads is everyone suggests how we as clients, or more precisely customers, can reduce lag rather than saying the is a programming fault, be it rendering or network. If Second Life was designed to support these features, it should support them. I should expect that if there is a limit to prims it's there because that is what the server is capable of handling, not what is theorhetically possible. Posts shouldn't be filled with "turn off x to help lag" it should be filled with "if you're going to allow prim hair, make it have 0 impact or don't add it."

How much cache on the client side is used if any? Rather than occlusion and the current draw distances maybe some other method of rendering the "over the horizon" sim next door would work, since not everyone wants to make their sim a giant dome. Why is there a cap of 1000kbps on the statistics bar when nearly all cable and plenty of home DSL lines are 3Mbps or faster downloading? If UUIDs are fixed, why not cache textures to the client harddrive? Why not allow terrain and building geometry to be "locked" so an entire sim could be cached but the avatars and temp rez objects? Not everyone has that much disk space? Find it hard to believe, but make it an option so sims could be built that require users with machines capable of running the sim without affecting others only be on it?

Again I am tossing out ideas not knowing the underpinnings of the client/server relationship of SL, I just know that there are fixes to be made by the company rather than by the customer. My computer can handle the lighting and the geometry quite fine, SL has shown me 80fps frame rates, so it's not me.

Heh, the whole local texture caching thing has been suggested before. A Lot.

Most of the other things like network speed, etc, I think has to do with SL being able to run on even 'low-end' computers. But time & technology moves on. Had it probably been written for higher end computers most people wouldnt be here. Personally I think it's kinda sad someone still thinks their GeForce2 should run anything new nowadays. It's like whining about Microsoft not supporting Windows 3.1 anymore.

The best thing I can tell you is, think of Second Life as "A work in progress". Slooooowly new things are added, old stuff is tweaked & optimized. If you look into LL as a whole, it's quite a small company compared to EA, Blizzard or other game companies, and not all of the Lindens are programmers.

Thank you very much Thili and Tod69. I realized there were other topics, even browsed a few, but you've given me some other searches to try to pursue this matter. I have a favor to ask, since this isn't the forum for the question I want to pose, I was hoping you guys might be able to point me in the right direction.

The question I want to ask and muse upon is, "What is the point of Second Life?"

Otherwise, I will pursue other topics for earlier talk of cacheing and the like, and continue to stew over people arguing over the value of their virtual money rather than how to fix the technology so that people who come to SL actually stay.

SL has several problems for performance,

It's single threaded so a slowdown in one area will slow the entire thing down.
It's CPU centric rather than GPU centric (Although I don't think there's any real hard information on this area).
LOD helps some but changing between LOD levels on detailed objects seems to really hurt framerate (Probably tied into being single threaded).
People make objects with little concern for performance. A typical avatar can be loaded down with prims, you can wear up to 7650 as attachments although realistically most people will pack 50-300. Pack 20 avatars into one area and you have half a sims limit of prims.

The 1000 limit is probably both to keep bandwidth usage under control and for performance reasons. Right now sims are required to put out 40Mb which is pretty hefty.

It's whatever you want it to be

A business, a fancy chat room, a place to learn/love/relax/build/script/explore etc, etc.

Unlike Online Games, there's no goals. No levels. No Quests.

For me it's Halloween 365 days/yr, 24/7. Dress up, be what you want to be, and have fun.

I've flown above the clouds, ridden tons of rides, driven sports cars & Space ships, sat on the beach & watched sunsets, partied till the wee hours of morning, danced with hot lookin' females, made friends, built things, sailed boats, explored uncharted islands, became a zombie, became a furry, became a female, watched movies, heard all kinds of music, met all kinds of people, wrote a tutorial, pissed people off, walked thru a maze, went skydiving, flew a plane..... yea, done lots of stuff and still keep finding more to do!

From the peanut gallery here, I gotta say, in my nearly one year in SL, your explaination of "What IS SL?" is the best one I've seen...

Tas

I still consider SL to be in the alpha-fase.....
I expect the beta-version to be released in 10 years.